Seagate Suddenly Realizes it’s in Storage Business

A few months ago, I made fun of Seagate for not knowing the business they are in. Today, it looks like Seagate has woken up and realized they are about to lose their shirts to the SSD (Solid State Drive) manufacturers. Surprise! They apparently had forgotten that they are in the storage business, not the hard drive business. While Seagate makes perhaps the best hard drives in the world, nobody gives a damn about hard drives. People care about storage.

Seagate’s response to the emerging SSD market is in the form of lawsuits. It’s a desperate attempt to try and stop the SSD manufacturers. It’s pathetic actually. Seagate’s CEO goes as far as to actually dismiss SSDs as a realistic alternative to disk-based HDs. If he truly believed that, he wouldn’t be throwing around law suit threats. But even funnier is that instead of responding to the threat by quickly reorganizing the company and becoming competitive in the SSD market, his response is to slam the other technology. Yeh, that’ll work! That’s why we all ride horse and buggies to work.

Bye bye Seagate! It was nice knowing you while it lasted. You have about 5 years of life left before you become a niche player.